Colorado Springs rejoins the horror roll of mass shootings.

The public health impact of these events are impossible to ignore. The Uvalde data, from another recent tragedy, are as instructive as they are depressing.

Today, we learned of another mass shooting in the United States. This time the innocent targets were members of the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

These events should never be deemed as just another acceptable risk of living, alongside motor vehicle collisions or other accidents. They hurt too much, and they tear apart too many lives.

Sure “only” in in 12,657 US residents died by homicide in 2021 (or nearly 8 per 100,000 people), but that’s not how it feels to the communities affected.

Take a look at the pediatric death statistics for Uvalde, Texas for the last 10 years, the site of another recent mass shooting. So few children die each month in that county, that the CDC actually “suppresses” the monthly numbers, reporting only larger figures over several years. (The CDC suppresses the data any time fewer than 10 deaths occur in a period being queried.)

In the decade leading up to the Uvalde school massacre in May of this year, approximately 0.19 children died per month there, or one every 5-6 months. And that’s from all causes combined, be it trauma, or rare instances of pediatric cancer, or heart disease. The CDC does not typically provide pediatric cause of death data in places like Uvalde, because the numbers are just too small. But we know what happened in May of 2022 there: A preventable massacre occurred, killing 19 helpless children (CDC data apparently does not yet account for the 19th child killed). The all-cause pediatric death rate in Uvalde for May 2022 was literally 100 times the usual rate of the preceding decade. Of the 38 pediatric deaths that occurred in Uvalde from July 2013-June 2022, 18 of them occurred in May of 2022.

Monthly all-cause mortality in children, Uvalde, Texas, 2013-2022. Suppressed cells indicate months when fewer than 10 deaths occurred). During this ten-year period, 38 deaths occurred, with 18 occurring in May of 2022. May 2022 was the only month with enough pediatric deaths to have the monthly data unsuppressed by the CDC.

This horrific reality that we and our children face today is not our destiny. No one solution will avert these disasters. But ignoring the danger of weapons of war in the hands of (mostly) young men with red flags continues to be the glaring weakness in our efforts to do anything successful to make our communities safer.

Public safety—including gun safety—is public health.